


Walking Far from Home: Hammer from the Sky

by wilySubversionist



Series: Walking Far from Home [6]
Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-06
Updated: 2011-04-06
Packaged: 2017-10-17 16:45:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wilySubversionist/pseuds/wilySubversionist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Naïve physics — some things plummet, not float. Stabs mean something to some flesh."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking Far from Home: Hammer from the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> _"i saw sunlight on the water, saw a bird fall like a hammer from the sky"_

**Listen:**

Staccato laughter. A whirring microwave buzz, fuzzy cymbal-snare pop. Helicopter blades. A dog’s bark.

A guillotine arm cutting through paper, scissors slicing Christmas wrap. A glass door sliding shut. New clean edges. Steam from a kettle before it whistles. A birdcage by a window, a rustle-shiver of feathers, wind in the wires.

A throttled shout, a thick blow to the solar plexus. A crumpled can hitting concrete. Marathoner’s breath in mile twenty-three and then more and then more. Then stop.

 **Watch:**

Twin winged lens-flares pass each other against the murky clouds. One, lime jello shot through with motor oil; the other gilded tangerine. They overlap, an obsidian length bisecting the orange form, then dart apart, magnets repelling. The black-green flares and fades.

The other, the bright orange that was bleeding its brilliance and became a rusty gold, hangs in place. Like a sheet of paper, it begins to waft down in a side to side motion, wings splayed like a parachute and making it float-shift: right, left, right, down.

Fading gold wings buckle and it — _he_ — plummets fast towards the gray ground, losing pigment as substance. Bleeding out traffic cone-colored pixels until, head high above the rocks, he bursts like a firework into birds. Digital sparks flying up, bright then ashy then gone.

A pale and featureless man watches the explosion above, mouth open in a broad shout. He holds a long sharp blade for an instant, and then it drops. A quick, hazy contrast. Sleight of hand, glinting graphite, sword caught by the dark shape and shoved deep into stone. Through the screaming white patch that spills ruddy red out from its — _his_ — center. Pinned, nowhere left to climb or fall. The shadow thing hovers, jaw working in a manic taunt.

 **Feel it:**

Impossible — _can’t have everything isn’t — nothing is — no touch, no_ — not real here—

 **Process it:**

—but this is really happening.

 _Focus, gather, everything is—_

Sound and sight are off and bleeding into each other, all perspectives— but it’s accurate. The crackling and strobe-streaking is factual. And clearer as you focus, pulling yourself in from all angles. Match and focus, _the orange is a boy with a bird nesting under his skin_. A boy you knew or know. The white, you can’t arrange, but sharpen yourself on, a pastel whetstone— _Daedalus, screaming, hit with hot red wax spilling from above and inside—_

You’re too loose. You don’t know what that means, and you don’t know why you know it. Pull in, converge, pull.

Black. The verdant bolts, the sizzle and the bubbling-baying cruelty. _Jack._

Jack, you remember, and he becomes the singularity you form you around. He: traitor. You: betrayed. He: slayer. You: twice-dead. He: black blade. You: orphaned.

You are yourself enough to feel angry, and to cling to it. It’s not enough to give you shape, no materials enough to build a single spot, a body, but it gives you lucidity. Names are returning, _proper nouns they’re called because they are identity-proper, namelessness negating being—_

You clamp down tight — John, I John, am — and fold up the impossible wideness of your thoughts. You are John, you are weightless above an oily fireslick, dead a second time and forced to listen and watch and curl around things you don’t know with a fierce perception that overwhelms you. You are incorporeal, drifting on the breeze. You are drawing in denser, and moving farther away.

You’re seeing and hearing a thing that you weren’t sure happened, when you were more sure of things, but it’s clear now — _Raven-Dave, Dave-the-Oriole, Dave-in-the-Machine_ is crashed, no longer is; his Guardian, the same. Even as you condense, more self than senses, you intuit that they are scattered, diffused binary feathers or thick crimson spread.

Your father, that same splatter, what’s left is lifeless. You’re angry again. He can’t gather up what’s spilled, because he is not on the wind and in it. Naïve physics — _some things plummet, not float._ Stabs mean something to some flesh.

But not yours.

 **Feel it:**

Yes, thicker now, not so spread, coming back together and feeling slimy-viscous rain on skin. You’re retreating from the blue-black sky backlit with chartreuse. The blooming red and the scattered nasturtium petals recede. You barely know them, but you grieve to leave them. How stupid, your father wasn’t the first, not by any stretch, not even the hardest; you had to be pulled apart to see it. These lives red-shift, running out, no coming home.

Not you, you are tide-foam touching shores, you are seeds on the breeze, reforming for always. _Changing, change, changed._

You wash into your body, a new breath borrowed from another’s lips and built upon. It’s cramped in your head and hands, a compact space for such an expanse. You are John again, whole, and blink to a new life. This one, you’ll keep, while they can’t.

**Author's Note:**

> A little shorter, a little weirder than usual. Hope it satisfies.  
> Also, some of the song-shades that built this groove, if you'd like to have them:  
> [A Golden Exit](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Z61ztLwZg)  
> [The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuzEoIuGNX4)  
> [A Slight Discomfort](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI2VZ0m2Y9c)


End file.
